Excerpt
“In addition to psychic numbing, there is another psychological disposition at work, called “pseudoinefficacy.” This tendency was demonstrated in another study of charitable giving, published this year in Frontiers in Psychology, also by Paul Slovic and colleagues. We found that people might be inclined to send money to an individual person in need, but that if they heard that a second person also required aid but could not be helped, they were less inclined to donate to the first person. Meeting that need no longer felt as satisfying. Similarly, when the need for assistance was described as part of a large-scale relief effort, potential donors would experience a demotivating sense of inefficacy arising from the thought that the help they could provide was but “a drop in the bucket.”